Scott and I like to play this little game where I send him an email saying “Hey, I updated the CMEpalooza archive with links to all the sessions from the previous CMEpalooza” and then he responds by saying “I thought you did that months ago, you doofus” and then I respond by saying “No, I just did it today, duh” and then he responds back with “It’s August, and the last CMEpalooza was in April, you ding-dong” and then I respond back to him with “Yeah, I know, I was there, duh” and on and on. He’s funny when he gets annoyed.

(Quick aside: while we may poke fun at each other on the blog, neither of us has ever written anything as devastatingly backhanded as what Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about Henry David Thoreau after meeting him for the first time:

Mr. Thorow [sic] dined with us yesterday. He is a singular character–a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion and becomes him much better than beauty. On the whole, I find him a healthy and wholesome man to know.

Now that’s a vicious compliment.

The point of all this is to say that the CMEpalooza archive has been updated and you can find links to all of our sessions there. There are a lot of them. Enjoy!

As many of the fans of our blog know, Derek and I are big fans of the Philadelphia 76ers (I know, I know – a lot of you don’t follow sports. Keep reading anyway). We both go to a smattering of home games and exchange furious text messages as another season goes down the tubes in the early rounds of the playoffs.

Big 76ers news last week, though, gave us renewed enthusiasm during the doldrums of the offseason. The 76ers ownership, along with a few well-heeled partners, announced plans to build a new downtown arena, scheduled to open in 2031. Of course, with any new stadium comes a new naming rights agreement. You know what I mean. Smoothie King Center. Talking Stick Resort Arena. KFC Yum! Center. Slap a little corporate branding up there for a few million (or hundreds of million) bucks, and voila!

So as various local entities put out the call for creative naming ideas of the proposed new stadium, we figured, “Hey, people love CMEpalooza. People also love a worthy cause. So why not give people a little of both?”

Here is what we are asking you to do:

1. Go to this link and flood their inbox with proposals for CMEpalooza Center (please, please, please, don’t misspell CMEpalooza. Big CME. Little palooza. Put them together. CMEpalooza). Make up a good story. Maybe Derek promised his son that if he got straight As in 9th grade that he’d do something special for him. Maybe my grandmother told me on her deathbed that her dying wish was to see CMEpalooza Center in lights. You get the idea.
2. Donate! Now, let’s be realistic here. At SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, naming rights cost $400 million over 20 years. That seems a bit, I dunno, excessive. So we’re setting the bar a little bit lower. We only want naming rights for 1 year. Let’s peg the cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million. That means we only need 25 of you to donate $1 million each! That’s less than 10 cents a day (Derek, check my math) (note from Derek: Close enough!).

This  is your chance to make an academic wunderkind/ailing octogenarian’s dream come true. Don’t let us down.

Hi all, Derek here. Just checking in to let you know that Scott and I are hard at work (or hardly working, am I right?) putting together the agenda for CMEpalooza Fall on October 19 and should have an update for you, oh, I don’t know, sometime in August? Let’s go with that. Make sure you mark it on your calendars now.

On another note, I just happened to notice that we now have 800 people signed up for our blog notifications, which is crazy for a couple reasons. First, it’s crazy because when I first created the blog, I didn’t even realize people could “sign up” for it until people started signing up for it and I would get an email notification telling me every time someone signed up. Unintentionally savvy marketing, which should probably be the CMEpalooza motto.

Second, it’s crazy because 800 people have intentionally signed up to get an email whenever we write something on the blog. I am, of course, taking this as confirmation that you all love my haikus, Top 5 lists, Sixers references, and book suggestions, and that I should write about them even more. Message received!

As a thank you to our loyal readers, I am including some of the jokes that CMEpalooza Spring participants included in our end-of-meeting survey. Are they good? Well…good is in the eye of the beholder. Hopefully some of them make you chuckle. Here they are:

CMEpalooza Jokes

When they dug up Beethoven’s grave, they found a little man erasing musical notes. They asked him what he was doing, and he said “I’m decomposing.”

A grasshopper walks into a bar and the bartender says, “We have a drink named after you!” So the grasshopper says, “You have a drink named Steve?”

Dad joke of the day: “People are shocked when they find out what a bad electrician I am!”

What concert costs just 45 cents? 50 Cent featuring Nickelback!

What do you call a pudgy psychic? A four-chin teller.

There were 2 cows in a field. One cow turned to the other and said, “Hey, have you heard about this mad cow disease?” The other cow said, “What do I care? I’m a helicopter!”

And now for a funny joke: The Philadelphia Eagles! Bahahahahah! (note from Derek: this was mean and uncalled for. Probably from a Cowboys fan.)